Dress Making

I love to sew. And when a favorite local fabric store was having a midsummer clearance sale I jumped on it. I asked Mom along for her advice and she ended up buying all the fabric! Thanks Mom!

There are some great blogs with full tutorials on whatever you want out there. I really love Me Sew Crazy (how great is that title?) (www.mesewcrazy.com). I set out to make a dress for each girl, but the dress for Natalie was small, so Lindsey got two: Spring Fever and Jackie-O. I have not made the pill-box hat to go along with the Jackie-O yet, but soon! It’s adorable! For Macy I made the Braided Dress because it was a little more ‘grown-up.’

I feel like I have to make a dress twice to really get it right. I will make this again (the Spring Fever) and know now where it needs more give and where it won’t. Having a dress form would be a dream!

Mom picked out this batik. Isn’t it cute?! I love the dots and stripes.

School Scheduling 95% Complete!!

Those words sound like a birdsong on a rainy day. School Scheduling 95% Complete. Can’t you just feel the way it rolls off your tongue? Wait. You can’t? Well, perhaps you haven’t spent uncountable hours pouring through texts and feverishly filling in a gird on Excel. You haven’t? Right, that must explain it.

This year I decided to do it a little differently and thus far (you know, not using it at all, but just sitting there with a glazed, loving smile admiring it) I really like it! :) The Porta-File holds three ring files for each week of our school year. I simply take out which week we are on, put it in my notebook, and voila. Done. Everything is contained therein. Yes, yes, I know, it sounds impossibly easy- BUT IT WAS A LOT OF WORK GETTING THERE! My sweet Man made endless copies and dealt with a very messy house (see my last entry) during this process. He must have the man’s version- Created to be HER Helpmeet! lol.

Things are sane once again. Only 5% more to go! And it’s just binder assembly, how hard can that be?! :) Speaking of, the kids were delighted to scrap covers for their binders. I started one, too, because everyone knows beauty enhances ease of use.

Scheduling Life

About four years ago I was in a bible study when a good friend said, “I clean my house once a week.” I stared at her, wide-eyed and thought, “Can it be possible?” That’s when we were living in an adorable but very tiny house, packed like peas in a pod. If two things were out of place it felt like the entire house was in an uproar. Now we’re living in a much larger house and I’m not vacuuming three times a day and doing all dishes by hand. Phew, that alone is wonderful! However, now I have hours in mowing and weed eating each week. In the time we’ve lived in our new home I have slacked with keeping with our ‘scheduled’ cleaning. Fridays are our ‘big clean-up days’ which involve our deep cleaning routine and it’s gotten us along well. As I’m looking into our future I see less and less ‘chunks’ of available time. That’s fine, what is filling those previous chunks are wonderful activities, but I can see that other areas of our life will have to change, too. I pulled out my old 3 ring binder with our chore schedule. Unfortunately, I tossed about half the papers I used to have, and will have to rebuild, but what’s there is good stuff.

A Virtuous Woman (www.avirtuouswoman.org) has some great printable sheets to get you started on your road to Home Cleanliness Freedom! lol. It’s under the At Home tab, Household Notebook. I haven’t visited the site in several years, but it looks like there is also a wealth of other great info, like teaching your kids how to pray, making memories, and even a home education link!

I’d love to hear how you manage your home! Happy Cleaning!

August Garden

Give me the splendid silent sun, with all its beams full-dazzling; give me the juicy fruit, ripe from the orchard…

-Walt Whitman

Our garden is going full steam and bringing us much delight. For the kids it’s a continual study of nature. From feeding striped grasshoppers to brightly colored spiders to catching a handful of frogs to simply watching the garden in it’s various stages we have all found felicity in it’s green depths. Other creatures enjoy it also; sweet tiny hummingbirds and scandalous little gophers who devour entire garlic heads. Our tomato plants are as tall or taller than I am and laden with plump green tomatoes. Our three varieties of basil are bursting, waiting on said tomatoes to ripen. Our corn has formed silken tassels. Yesterday I planted more seeds for a late fall harvest.

Bulls-eye!

When Donald was done several months ago, Dad took us up into the hills for a little target practice. Burglars beware the Worthingtons! The little bullet holes were from me! Donald had two, also. Dad hit the red first, and I’m sure would have completely shown me up but he let us do most of the shooting. Donald was a sharp shooter in the Army. Hooah, brosef! Dad took some snap shots of Donald and me and I’ll get those up later.